Writers Reading Quotes

You know, you hear about these writers reading 'Lolita' at 12. I wanted to be a chemistry teacher. ~ Susan Barker

Authors do not need to offer us the answers to such weighty questions such as how to live and prepare us to accept death. The aim of a writer's is to frame worldly questions that allow all readers too independently and jointly explore life-altering questions in a way that satisfies the fabric of thought corresponding to our respective times. ~ Kilroy J. Oldster

Is it not a pity when some stylistic subtlety is lost without trace by the reader's inattention? ~ David Richards

That's just it, Eva said with a gleam in her eyes that matched the rhinestones on her glasses, you had to get somebody to teach you, to facilitate. Literacy wasn't like a piece of my mama's lemon cake you handed over to somebody on a plate. ~ Minrose Gwin

We've inherited many ideas about writing that emerged in the eighteenth century, especially an interest in literature as both an expression and an exploration of the self. This development - part of what distinguishes the "modern" from the "early modern" - has shaped the work of many of our most celebrated authors, whose personal experiences indelibly and visibly mark their writing. It's fair to say that the fiction and poetry of many of the finest writers of the past century or so - and I'm thinking here of Conrad, Proust, Lawrence, Joyce, Woolf, Kafka, Plath, Ellison, Lowell, Sexton, Roth, and Coetzee, to name but a few - have been deeply autobiographical. The link between the life and the work is one of the things we're curious about and look for when we pick up the latest book by a favorite author. ~ James Shapiro

To read is to cover one's face. And to write is to show it. ~ Alejandro Zambra

I am forever an advocate of books, both the reading of them and the writing. There is something sacred to me in that community. Because writing
and reading
is a solitary business. And it's good to know I'm not alone. ~ Shannon Celebi

Maybe this is why we read, and why in moments of darkness we return to books: to find words for what we already know. ~ Alberto Manguel

Read different to think differently; world is already into rat race. ~ Aman Jassal

So it is that a writer writes many books. In each book, he intended several urgent and vivid points, many of which he sacrificed as the book's form hardened. ~ Annie Dillard

The best gift you can give me is a book. ~ Lailah Gifty Akita

For most writers, reading is also a very intense experience; they don't read so much as compete. The writer measure's himself against every text he encounters, imagining he could do it better or wishing he had thought of it first. The natural writer would almost always rather be reading, writing, or alone, except of course when he needs to come up for air (that is, for subject matter, food, sex, love, attention). He may be a selfish son of a bitch, he may seem to care more about his work than about the people in his life, he may be a social misfit, a freak, or a smooth operator, but every person who does serious time with a keyboard is attempting to translate his version of the world into words so that he might be understood. Indeed, the great paradox of the writer's life is how much time he spends alone trying to connect with other people. ~ Betsy Lerner

Reading is like magic--I think I've made my case. Without the gift of words, this world's a crazy place! ~ Denise Walter McConduit

I don't care if a reader hates one of my stories, Just as long as he finishes the book. ~ Roald Dahl

Some books send you around the world, while others send you around the bend. ~ Kevin Ansbro

The Six Golden Rules of Writing: Read, read, read, and write, write, write. ~ Ernest Gaines

Writing is the only thing that when I do it, I don't feel I should be doing something else. ~ Gloria Steinem

All of us are writers reading other people's writing, turning pages or clicking to the next screen with pleasure and admiration. All of us absorb other people's words, feeling like we have gotten to know the authors personally in our own ways, even if just a tiny bit. True, we may also harbor jealousy or resentment, disbelief or disappointment. We may wish we had written those words ourselves or berate ourselves for knowing we never could or sigh with relief that we didn't, but thank goodness someone else has. ~ Pamela Paul

To be a better cook, cook more. To be a better writer, read more. ~ Mokokoma Mokhonoana

Don't mistake a good setup for a satisfying conclusion - many beginning writers end their stories when the real story is just ready to begin. ~ Stanley Schmidt

Statistically, if you're reading this sentence, you're an oddball. The average American spends three minutes a day reading a book. At this moment, you and I are engaged in an essentially antiquated interaction. Welcome, fellow Neanderthal! ~ Dick Meyer

There are but twenty-six letters in the English alphabet, yet I must have read a quadrillion words. ~ Kevin Ansbro

I think in reading a few sentences of text you can just tell the tone, and that's something I love in prose writers. ~ Lauren Mayberry

The best effect of any book is that it excites the reader to self activity. ~ Thomas Carlyle

Books are to be call'd for, and supplied, on the assumption that the process of reading is nor a half-sleep, but, in highest sense, an exercise, a gymnast's struggle; that the reader is to do something for himself, must be on the alert, must himself or herself construct indeed the poem, argument, history, metaphysical essay - the text furnishing the hints, the clue, the start or frame-work. Not the book needs so much to be the complete thing, but the reader of the book does. That were to make a nation of supple and athletic minds well-train'd, intuitive, used to depend on themselves, not on a few coteries of writers. ~ Walt Whitman

Conflict. Conflict. Where art thou conflict? ~ Buffy Andrews

With various readings stored his empty skull, Learn'd without sense, and venerably dull. ~ Charles Churchill

I honestly think in order to be a writer, you have to learn to be reverent. If not, why are you writing? Why are you here? Let's think of reverence as awe, as presence in and openness to the world. The alternative is that we stultify, we shut down. Think of those times when you've read prose or poetry that is presented in such a way that you have a fleeting sense of being startled by beauty or insight, by a glimpse into someone's soul. All of a sudden everything seems to fit together or at least to have some meaning for a moment. This is our goal as writers, I think; to help others have this sense of
please forgive me
wonder, of seeing things anew, things that can catch us off guard, that break in on our small, bordered worlds. ~ Anne Lamott

Life has a vendetta against writers. It does everything in it's power to get in the way of our craft. Maybe it thinks we embellish too much? ~ Hannah Harding

Most people carry their demons around with them, buried down deep inside. Writers wrestle their demons to the surface, fling them onto the page, then call them characters. ~ C.K. Webb

Don't pull people into your own storm! Let them stay safe outside your storm! ~ Mehmet Murat Ildan

To read is to climb the high places! ~ Mehmet Murat Ildan

No man understands a deep book until he has seen and lived at least part of its contents. ~ Ezra Pound

In the finest critics one hears the full cry of the human. They tell one why it matters to read. ~ Harold Bloom

Writers are magpies by nature, always collecting shiny things, storing them away and looking for connections of things. ~ John Connolly

You will need seed money, so begin saving for your book. Don't give up. Also, write down the ideas that you have right away so you don't lose them. ~ Soraya Diase Coffelt

I don't sit around waiting for passion to strike me. I keep working steadily, because I believe it is our privilege as humans to keep making things. Most of all, I keep working because I trust that creativity is always trying to find me, even when I have lost sight of it. ~ Elizabeth Gilbert

A reading life... is an adventure without maps where you meet unexpected soulmates along the way. ~ Joe Queenan

As writers, we live very much in our own minds much of the time, buzzing in our unconscious spaces as we go about the business of living in the world. ~ Laurie Foos

I never studied acting, yet the first time I auditioned and did a cold reading, I surprised everyone for my honesty and limpidity. They told me I could play any role because I have no walls, I don't put anything between me and the character I have to play. ~ Jennifer Lawrence

I regretted the solitary nature of the writer's life - other people, normal working people, spent their days with co-workers, rode the subway home with a crowd, walked through thronged streets. I worked at home, all by myself. ~ Kate Christensen

It is so small secret that many writers are also alcoholics, drug addicts, sexual deviants, or habitual wearers of blue jeans (in some cases all of the above). ~ Arthur Graham

It is absurd and anti-life to be a part of a system that compels you to listen to a stranger reading poetry when you want to learn to construct buildings, or to sit with a stranger discussing the construction of buildings when you want to read poetry. ~ John Taylor Gatto

Reading is rapture (or if it isn't, I put the book down meaning to go on with it later, and escape out the side door). ~ William Maxwell

When asked, 'What is more important: praying or reading the Bible?' I ask, 'What is more important: breathing in or breathing out? ~ Russ Scalzo

I didn't know anything about writers. It never occurred to me they were regular people and that I could grow up to become one, even though I loved to make up stories inside my head. ~ Judy Blume

I think school is so important. I was good student. A rebel, but I did well in my studies. I don't close myself to anything. I liked reading and I still love learning. I loved history and German. ~ Bruno Tonioli

In terms of the idea of long-term occupation - I have been reading a little bit more about this period - and you can see in that occupation are many lessons for the current occupation of Iraq. So we have these connections that go way back that people aren't aware of. ~ Edwidge Danticat

In truth, Kipling's politics are not mine. But then, it would be a poor sort of world if one were only able to read authors who expressed points of view that one agreed with entirely. It would be a bland sort of world if we could not spend time with people who thought differently, and who saw the world from a different place. ~ Neil Gaiman

Most people, when directly confronted by evidence that they are wrong, do not change their point of view or course of action but justify it even more tenaciously. Even irrefutable evidence is rarely enough to pierce the mental armor of self-justification. When we began working on this book, the poster boy for "tenacious clinging to a discredited belief" was George W. Bush. Bush was wrong in his claim that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction, he was wrong in claiming that Saddam was linked with Al Qaeda, he was wrong in predicting that Iraqis would be dancing joyfully in the streets to receive the American soldiers, he was wrong in predicting that the conflict would be over quickly, he was wrong in his gross underestimate of the financial cost of the war, and he was most famously wrong in his photo-op speech six weeks after the invasion began, when he announced (under a banner reading MISSION ACCOMPLISHED) that "major combat operations in Iraq have ended. ~ Carol Tavris

The great thing about reading diverse news from the fields of business, health, science, technology, politics, and more is that you automatically see patterns in the world and develop mental hooks upon which you can hang future knowledge. ~ Scott Adams

You have a poem called "Bad Theology." What would you call a bad theology?
I guess any theology that presumes to have God in its pocket. Can I explain this without sinning further? We'll find out. The community in which I was raised did what they would call theology, but it was always a kind of cranky, brutal reduction of lush and beautiful complexities into the lowest common denominator, the dullest version. But when I went away to school and started reading more, I became increasingly dissatisfied with any theology that replaces the enormous, immeasurable real with very measurable and very calculated replacements. I'm not saying this very eloquently, but I guess bad theology articulates as definitive and conclusive that which is unknowable and without end. ~ Tony Leuzzi

Artists, composers and writers...are bent upon capturing and reining in the insights of a fugitive imagination, always inclined to shoot off into the distance, before they can get away, and on bringing them back into the immediacy of material engagement. Like hunters, they too are dream-catchers. ~ Tim Ingold

Pleasing things: finding a large number of tales that one has not read before. Or acquiring the second volume of a tale whose first volume one has enjoyed. But often it is a disappointment. ~ Sei Shonagon

A cool & diversified version of a mix tape. The BreakBeat Poets is a thorough and complete summation of Golden Era writers who continue to build the scene of literary and performance poetry. ~ Chance The Rapper

I have certain rules that I've established for myself that took a while post-day job to figure out. Everyone says people who freelance or are writers struggle with the structure of it. I'm not allowed to check email before a certain hour. I'm not allowed to run errands during the day. I have to write a certain amount every day. ~ Sloane Crosley

The most difficult thing about writing; is writing the first line. ~ Amit Kalantri

The art of reading, as of learning, is this: ... to retain the essential, to forget the nonessential. ~ Adolf Hitler

If ever a man was too clever for his own good, it was the learned Daor Ranald. A middle-aged scholar with silver-rimmed spectacles and a curly brown mop of hair that refused any efforts at taming, he was always moving, talking, or reading. Often all at once. ~ L.H. Leonard

Hence, instead of Man Thinking, we have the bookworm. Hence, the book-learned class, who value books, as such; not as related to nature and the human constitution, but as making a sort of Third Estate with the world and the soul. Hence, the restorers of readings, the emendators, the bibliomaniacs of all degrees. ~ Ralph Waldo Emerson

Reading is like a flame that lights the way for your heart and mind. ~ Tahani Shihab

I want to lay under the blanket of sky and laugh while the stars wink and we write our story. ~ A.D. Posey

But reading is different, reading is something you do. With TV, and cinema for that matter, everything's handed to you on a plate, nothing has to be worked at, they just spoon-feed you. The picture, the sound, the scenery, the atmospheric music in case you haven't understood what the director's on about ... The creaking door that tells you to be stiff. You have to imagine it all when you're reading. ~ Daniel Pennac

[When under stress I thought of] the books I had read [and applied] them to myself. I [imagined I was] one of the characters [and soon found myself] in made-up circumstances which were most agreeable to my inclinations. ~ Jean-Jacques Rousseau

Reading well makes children more interesting both to themselves and others, a process in which they will develop a sense of being separate and distinct selves. ~ Harold Bloom

I think of my own work as part of a decades-long conversation about books and reading with people I will mainly never meet. ~ Michael Dirda

On the road to your target, move cleverly and silently; when you reached your target, be humble and silent! ~ Mehmet Murat Ildan

So the beloved children's book author took a deep breath, opened his own book to the very first page, and began reading, hoping with all his heart that the story would remind him where his sister went all those years ago.... ~ Chris Colfer

In Ruth's view, they looked 'like a couple' because they seemed to possess some terrible secret between them - they appeared stricken with remorse when they saw her. Only a novelist could ever imagine such nonsense. (In part, it was because of her perverse ability to imagine anything that in this instance Ruth failed to imagine the obvious) ~ John Irving

When she'd read, her voice wrapped around my head and my heart, and it softened and lightened everything up. It put a pain in my hear that felt good. ~ Katherine Hannigan